Reviving the "Interpretive Diversity" Hypothesis

Adam Bear's last post encouraged me in presenting my own pet hypothesis about the Knobe Effect. It can be found in this paper, written with Emmanuel Dupoux and Pierre Jacob , and forthcoming in Mind & Language. Following Nichols and Ulatowski's proposal, we consider that the Knobe Effect and the Skill Effect can be accounted for only if we accept that "intentionally" has three different meanings that are differently elicited by contextual cues.

To put it in a nutshell, here are (roughly) the three meanings:

1) According to Meaning 1, X is done intentionally only if the agent had a pro-attotude towards X. This meaning is preferentially triggered when X is something we expected the agent to desire (where "expectations" can be normative or statistical, and where normative expectations usually trump statistical expectations)

2) According to Meaning 2, X is done intentionally only if the agent was not reluctant or forced to do X. This meaning is preferentially triggered when X is something we expected the agent to be reluctant to do.

3) According to Meaning 3, X is done intentionally if the agent had control over his action and X was not brought by pure chance or accident. This meaning is preferentially triggered when it is salient that the agent needs skill or luck to perform his action.

Now, what does it have to do with Adam's results? I think that this hypothesis can easily explain those. One thing we insist upon on our paper is that Meanings 1 and 2 are insensitive to how much control the agent has upon his action, while Meaning 3 is very sensitive to this factor. Now, Adam's virtuous scenarios will preferentially elicit Meaning 1 while his reprehensible scenarios will preferentially elicit Meaning 2, leading to Meaning 3 being less employed, and answers be less sensitive to the agent's control upon his action. On the contrary, neutral scenarios will tend to elicit less Meanings 1 and 2 (for lack of expectations), and more Meaning 3, and thus more answers sensible to the agent's control.

This account leads to two further predictions:

1) Intentionality ratings will be much more correlated with the amount of desire attributed to agents in the virtuous and reprehensible scenarios than in the neutral scenarios.

2) The same pattern of results could be found for non-moral scenarios if we contrast three scenarios: (i) scenarios in which participants expect the agent to deeply desire the outcome, (ii) scenarios in which participants expect participants to be deeply reluctant to bring about the outcome, and (iii) scenarios in which the outcome is so indifferent we do not expect the agent to desire or to be reluctant to bring it about. In cases of causal deviances, I predict that intentionaliy ratings will be higher for scenarios (i) and (ii) than for scenarios (iii).

Comments

[Adam Bear]

Interesting hypothesis! I guess I have two questions/comments. First, it seems to me that your theory might actually predict that we'd get *greater* differences between the virtuous/reprehensible cases and the neutral cases if the factors you mention play a central role in judgments of what's intentional. For instance, in the train case that I mention in my post, Janet would presumably have a very strong pro-attitude to save the children in the virtuous condition (Meaning 1), but her tripping on the lever in the neutral condition was completely accidental (Meaning 3). And though I realize that you say "only if" in your definitions and that other factors might therefore be relevant or necessary for judgments of intentionality, I get the sense that the pro-attitude and the controllability are playing greater roles in your theory than what our data suggest (and similarly for Janet's lack of reluctance in the reprehensible condition).

The other thing, which may've been hard to glean from my post, is that not only our virtuous cases, but also all of our neutral cases involved an agent desiring to bring about an outcome that might in some sense be expected, at least for instrumental reasons (e.g., Pierre is a chef at a fancy restaurant who wants to please a food critic). Here, I'm not sure if your theory values instrumentally normative reasons as highly as morally normative reasons (that might be what you mean by "statistical normative expectations"), so maybe you would predict that the neutral and virtuous cases both rely on Meaning 1, but to a lesser degree in the former case. Nonetheless, in the train scenario, we did find that subjects rate the *degree* of desire to be the same in the neutral and virtuous conditions. This is, of course, not a measure of *expected* desire, nor does it get at the instrumental/moral distinction that is perhaps relevant. In any case, maybe Fiery and I will someday get to test your hypothesis!

[Florian Cova]

Good points!

As to your first point, I do not think that all participants use Meaning 1 for the virtuous case and that all participants use Meaning 3 for the neutral case - an hypothesis that seems too unrealistic. My prediction was that the presence of a good outcome (an outcome we expect the agent to desire) will trigger more participants to use Meaning 1, and thus will decrease the number of participants using Meaning 3. Thus, I predict a decrease in intentionality ratings between the two cases but I'm not commited to a given difference size (I wish I could be able to predict the difference size, but I have to say I'm not).

To the second point: I was not saying that you should get different degrees of desires between virtuous and neutral scenarios (in fact, I didn't expect you to). What I was saying is that in virtuous case, the moral goodness of the outcome is so salient that expectations about the agents'desire are preferentially triggered, and Meaning 1 preferentially elicited. In neutral scenarios, the fact that the agent desires the outcome might be a less salient feature of the scenario.

That might seem a little abstract, but here is a more concrete example (discussed in our paper) : Sripada has a version of Knobe's "hitting-the-bull's-eye case" in which he insists on the fact that the agent desires the outcome. In this version, most participants judge the outcome intentional, even if it is a clear case of causal deviation. Contrary to Sripada, I don't think that this shift is due to the fact that people suddenly ascribe more desires to the agent (it was already said in the original scenario that the agent desired to hit the bull's-eye), but to the fact that Sripada's case dwells at length on the fact that the agent desires the outcome, making this feature of the scenario more salient (and thus preferentially triggering Meaning 1, etc.).

Anyway, there might be a prediction you can already check (if you have some time): do you find greater correlation between desires rating and intentionally ratings for the virtuous and reprehensible cases than for the neutral case?

[Adam Bear]

At this point we have desire ratings only for the train case, and it was from old data that's not referenced in my post, so it's hard to get a good picture of things. Ultimately, I think we'd have to run some more subjects to get a real sense of the interaction between desire and intentionality judgments, which Fiery and I will hopefully get to do at some point in the near future. Right now, we're working on something completely different, but your and others' comments have encouraged me to pursue this work further.